Speaker
Description
As part of research by a Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, of a 17th century Tibetan sculpture, details of the internals of the sculpture were needed to be determined non-destructively. The sculpture, a Buddhist deity known as “Vajrabhairava with consort Vajravetali” measured approximately 27” x 18” x 12”. The sculpture was presumed hollow and made of several parts from copper and brass alloy that were joined during the final stages. The goal was to determine if the hollow body of the sculpture had any religious content such as scribes, relics, paper, or other items often encapsulated in such ancient sculptures.
We determined that our 6/9MeV industrial accelerator-based x-ray computed tomography (CT) system, normally used for inspection of aerospace flight hardware and other complex additively manufactured components would be able to penetrate the size and density of the sculpture and would reveal internal details with the required resolution and image fidelity.
The talk will discuss how the inspection technique was developed using a timesaving “flyby region of interest scan” from which the required system parameter settings were determined as well as the measures taken to eliminate any potential for ring artifacts, beam hardening artifacts, streaking, scatter radiation and noise.
The results together with correlation of image indications with likely artifacts caused by the manufacturing process will be provided and discussed.
